Listening to customers and designing to specification has made Universal Homes unique in its industry of building homes and creating lifestyles. A recently implemented financial system - Greentree (who were recently recognised as one of 25 global rising stars by MIS magazine) - is playing its part in strengthening this business.

Prior to 1997, Universal Homes used a customised building based software package on an AS/400 IBM mainframe system.  "The software would take you to a point of trial balance," says Universal Homes accountant Rachel Yovich, "but that was the limit of the financial reporting. There was no possibility of exporting data.

In 1997, with a change of ownership of their parent company, Universal Homes was free to source systems that better suited their operation.  "A project costing package was our core requirement," says financial controller, Debbie Landale, "alongside a totally integrated, year 2000 compliant financial system. With our RFI in the market, Cardinal Group presented two solutions in conjunction - Greentree and Workbench" (a JADE-based project management system developed by Task Management).

It was critical to Universal Homes that both systems be developed in the same language, to avoid interface problems. An advantage of the system being JADE-based was that it was a modern language and easy to use. Universal Homes reviewed five other systems, but the successful integration between the Greentree and Workbench systems was the deciding factor.

"With our end of financial year in December and annual audit due in January, it was critical the system went live on December 1st," says Yovich. "However, we wanted to allow time for the system to settle in, so decided to become a beta site in October 1998 to be assured of the system's integrity."

As New Zealand's first Greentree beta site, Universal Homes purchased all the released modules of the Greentree financial package.  "As a beta site we had the benefit of providing useful input into the end product and appreciated Greentree International taking on board our requests," she says. "Over the months, we worked closely with them and their support team from Endeavour Solutions."

Landale says because Universal were previously producing reports manually in Excel; aesthetically there was little difference in how their reports looked, but behind the scenes there was new-found flexibility in report production.

"With all our budgets in Excel," she says, "the ability to use the Greentree Excel add-in to upload information straight into Greentree was outstanding.  If we wanted to review our budgets quarterly, six monthly or compare current to past budgets it's a simple process."

"The Cash Management module is also excellent," says Yovich, "with the reconciliation side speeding up processing, and enabling our banking software (Westpac's DeskBank), to directly interface into Greentree."

Financial reports contain historical information and the financial team at Universal Homes wanted to spend more time focusing on future activity. They are now producing reports by the 8th of the month and have shaved two days off their month-end timetable.

With the time saving, flexibility and efficiencies we are experiencing," says Landale, "it now allows the financial team do more value added activities for the company."

For more information

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/universal_homes.cfm

Graham Hill
Greentree International
Ph: 0800 313 313
Fax: 09 366 3889
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

June 2003

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